Lying which wardrobe?

Wanted... I like quiet walks in the park, empty streets, early dinners, grumpy old people, and chavs. I'm as happy eating "foam" in 100 flavours at expensive restaurants, as I am frikadels from a febo window. Am looking to meet partner city for lasting relationship.

Must be spontaneous, love crowds, enjoy mountains, sun and outdoors, know how to make a good cocktail, eating great food, and partying. 28 days later

This blog was intended to be entitled 28 days later, and, predictably, was intended to be 28 days after my return to the Hague.

Alas, time and lethargy hooked their claws in me and ... well, 3 months later just isn't as catchy. Returning to the Hague, I found myself walking the streets one Saturday morning, the broad avenues empty of all life, an occasional loose piece of litter fluttering across an undriven road, climbing onto an untread pavement, circling a while before idling in a dusty corner. It reminded me of the movie where a virus takes hold of the UK, and the heroes walk through a vacant Piccadilly Circus which for all the world seems like time has stopped and they are the last people on earth (this is before being attacked by monkey like infected people wanting to tear strips out of their necks).

The lion the witch and the wardrobe
In such circumstances, your average inhabitant's attention drifts to more domestic attractions. I was heartened to hear recently that Steve Jobs would spend 8 years looking for the perfect couch. Not only because it is a convenient link to the genius and commercial mega success of Jobs, but because until then I did feel somewhat alone in the world as I searched the web endlessly for the perfect "Italian style not too expensive just the right colour, style and shape couch which hopefully someone would deliver too, while removing the old skanky one free of charge". A fairly straightforward proposition that has consumed my first 3 months here (ok, not 8 years… yet).

Similarly the wardrobe. It turns out, moving in with someone, that 1+1=5 and we have a rear bedroom absolutely full with boxes. A quick trip to Ikea improved the situation slightly and we now have something like Fashion week meets X Files warehouse, with rack after open rack of clothes butted up against mountains of boxes. These boxes are of considerable importance. They are the end result of a series of clean-out permutations and efficiency drives that result in a very select remnant. These are known as the "shit that no-one quite knows what to do with". One box was even labelled dramatically and presciently by the London movers as "ITEMS FROM SPACE", another helpfully, if not a little ominously, advises us that it contains "EVERYTHING".

As time drifts on, inevitably these spaces earn also a prestigious title; "room that all the shit goes in when you can't really think of a place to put stuff". There is no need in such an oversized wardrobe-house to have an ethereal backing that leads to a mysterious icy wonderland. It's quite possible to get lost among the boxes, where a person can regularly discover weird and wonderful things on a regular basis.

To give you a taste, this room-wonderland is home to 7x multi-multi point extension plugs (the kind that 1920's Dutch houses love to fry), a tin painting and a piece of broken door from Carolina's college days, a motorbike battery, 5x half finished painted canvases and a miniature wood model man, a romanesque pot holder, a Marimekko giant beanbag, training manuals, an air dust cleaner, and a Barcelona Ottoman without a cushion.

It's clear to the reader that this is no throwaway bric a brac to be trifled with - it's more the kind of stuff that makes up Michael Macintyre's "Man Draw"; seemingly useless stuff whose purpose will ultimately become abundantly clear when we receive a knock on the door from Dutch homeland security, calling for our help to solve a problem that requires a beanbag, a small dummy, a pot holder and a beanbag (with the manuals unbelievably indicating how the whole assembly avoids global disaster and restores balance to the world once again).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgUpDGAIdds

The Lion Witch Wardrobe backroom will not disappear in a hurry. It will probably linger until we appreciate it's full necessity and give up thoughts of installing a small office, second bedroom or walk in wardrobe (of the more organised and intentional variety).

 Winter is approaching….

The circle of life

As I come toward the end of my stay here in the far east, the steppes, it's only fitting I go back to my first blog, before I decided I was an investigative journalist and got all off subject. So, some of you may recognise the landscape in the adjacent picture as the same landscape, or at least same shot from way back in early 2010. The tree came, it went, then sprouted forth in glorious strands of LED driven bloom, set off against an iridescent trippy astroturf. It's surprisingly convincing up close, and my first comment to a fellow commuter was that the grass wouldn't last the summer. The electrico-trees, I suspected, were not entirely natural. Perhaps GM.

I was first disappointed and cynical at finding out the whole garden is plastic, fake, driven by high doses of electricity and presumably hazardous luminescent chemicals. But I've come to love this little garden over the past week. It has an uplifting, cheerful quality reminiscent of the Telly-tubby's TV set, but is made out of chloro-boro-benzo-carbonate materials tougher than nature can concoct. And Atyrau needs cheering up.
There's a guy here I see in the lift, who I greet with a, no doubt gratingly cheerful, "hello, hows it going?" a couple of times a week. He doesn't know what to do with the human contact. He sits in the company paid for cafeteria, focussed on his buffet quality lunch, at an empty table for four, amused not even by the TV. He's like a young male Eleanor Rigby, and he's not one individual but he's every fourth guy I see.
After my own recent foray into the stockmarket, money seems such and ethereal (..) thing to make a person come out to a frontier like this, to endure boredom, loneliness and separation. But then money's a powerful elixir (my ill-fated foray into the stockmarket has been my kryptonite, when it comes to getting too attached to money).
The tree's evoke another response too - what's wrong with something artificial, where nature can't provide. I struggled with this first when working briefly in Abu Dhabi, and drove from the city 250km to a power and desalination plant; the road was lined three deep with thick foliage, practically fueled by an equivalent number of kilometres of polyethylene veins, pulsing with millions of litres of water purified through oil fueled desalination, delivered by giant oil fueled compressors that form the steel heart of this system.
The then head of Abu Dhabi emirate, Sheik Zayed, foreseeing one day the end of oil perhaps, had a vision of this desolate desert nation becoming not only a nerve centre for business in the middle east but a giant ecological oasis, made possible by a somehow perverse but somehow appealing and logical cycle, by combusting the epochs-old decayed plant matter in turbines that chug out pressure and energy to give life. The theory was apparently that if enough foliage could be induced to grow, it would eventually reach a critical mass that exerted it's influence on the climate and soils to a point of sustainable growth.
The idea seems at one time optimistic and naive but perhaps also has a touching altruism. It is one I've learned since is shared elsewhere, even here in Kazakhstan. Polymer LED trees aside, the planting programmes also continue in Atyrau, along all the roads and highways and in the parks, sucking water from the Ural and aquifers, and employing an army of gardeners who bravely face what looks like an eternal struggle.

The revolution WILL be televised

Gil Scot Heron roused 70's black americans, close on the heels of the Watts riots, with the promise that the revolution would not be televised, that we would not be able to skip out for beer in the commercials, that there would be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in instant replay (..."the revolution will be live...").


As far as Egypt's goes, he couldn't be more wrong. BBC has shown virtually nothing but the Egyptian revolution since unrest began, pictures of stone throwing and assaults by undercover police abound, and I was indeed able to skip to the kitchen for a beer without missing too much. He was correct that it will not be brought to us by Xerox, whose recent growth in the region will no doubt be hit by developments (although Exxon is pretty much Xerox spelled backwards and a few letters changed).

Mubarak, Egypt's fourth and longest standing president should be seen as a success story. Not only does he look great for a guy born in '28, he's held on to office for 30 years, and rising from his poor origins, leaves office with an estimated $30-70 Billion for his toils. A regular Rockefeller, squirrelling away whatever pennies chanced to come his way.

The revolution has concerned the arab world, sparking worries that unrest is spreading to other states led by overstaying heads of state, including Yemen (small peaceful crowds), Algeria (pressured now to end a 19 year state of emergency) and Jordan (firing their government and experiencing largest protests in 20 years) to name a few. Similar predictions, after Tunisia's fall, accurately placed Egypt at the top of the list.

And concerns extend further afield. China has censored internet searches on Egypt, lest the population get any ideas. It's easy to extrapolate that, beyond China, peoples around the globe are questioning just how absolute their leaders' power really is.

It's a massive event. And a massive event gets round the clock television attention.

Prior to the Tunis crisis, much of my news hour was being taken up by news of Laurent Gbago of Cote D'ivoire, who refused to step down from his presidency after disputed electoral results. Gbago had come to power 10 years earlier. Interestingly, this was by popular uprising and there's some reason to doubt global news coverage of this event, which repeatedly and near exclusively cites the irrelevant, non-constitutional "Ivory Coast Electoral Commission". It is also led by French protestations. The French are far from the ideal, objective interlocutor, owning for example 45% of Cd'I land (UN sources). French assisted insurrection and prolonged tensions in the country over the course of Gbago's reign, for example arming mercenaries and plotting assassination attempts.

And in the not too distant past, BBC viewers' blood boiled as British led news and the international community rained condemnation on Mugabe's treatment of white farmers. White farmers who still owned 40% of land confiscated in many cases only 40 years or so earlier.

You probably won't see it televised, well, quite like that.

Baron Acton once muttered (via letter) that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." It's interesting that last phrase eludes the collective memory, as it carries perhaps more resonance than the earlier. With this in mind, we see a bigger picture than surrounds the dramas of the petty despots or tyrannical regimes in Africa, Indonesia, Asia or the Middle East. The dramas involve our own governments, our Great Men (and women), our histories and legacies and therefore ourselves - they demand our interest.

A news issue that requires no introduction is the Wikileaks scandal. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the leaks, there can be few that see the heavy handed and surreptitious attempts to get hold of Assange and his followers as fair and honest (except perhaps Sarah Palin, who has no doubt superimposed a target over his location, on her electioneering site). Unless you would like to believe Gadaffi's take on it in the Egypt context, that Wikileaks indirectly provokes this kind of discontent. But where is the media condemnation or even cynicism.

Similarly, a friend with interests in Cote D'Ivoire has followed intensely developments there, trawling French and Cd'I internet news-sites and blogs to filter out the genuine or balanced truth. Ban ki-Moon rejects Gbago's suggestion of a vote recount as a "grave injustice" (why does that take me back to the year 2000 in Florida?) or, on Egypt, the head of this international body offers the vacuous "I urge restraint by all sides". Meanwhile, the media and television offers us the minimalist, superficial account with repeated footage of four young men yelling Mubarak is a thief, or a woman on a cellfone saying she want's everyone to get along. It offers a "trailer" - the main acts, the main facts never arrive. This was one of Assange's stated motivations for Wikileaks, to compensate for the death of journalism.

There is certainly drama in the moment, in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Algeria and beyond. The moment and the drama will pass, the televised natures of these affairs will only grow, as will our responsibility to filter or interpret them. Problem is, how often do we question, how often do we dive deeper; as Aesop Rock raps, "if the revolution ain't gonna be televised, then f*** I'll probably miss it".

The revolution WILL be televised, but he won't be missing much.